


split the world open

by lyricalecho



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: F/F, Loss, Memory, parenting, second person introspective purple prose weirdness, time displacement, what else would you expect from a lucretia fic.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-16
Updated: 2017-08-16
Packaged: 2018-12-16 07:49:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11824281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyricalecho/pseuds/lyricalecho
Summary: 'Life is short and the worldis at least half terrible, and for every kindstranger, there is one who would break you,though I keep this from my children.'- 'Good Bones,' Maggie SmithTwo women, in search of a greater good, find each other. Some decisions, once made, cannot be undone.





	split the world open

**Author's Note:**

> i've been talking about some iteration of this fic for nearly a year now, and now here it is, in our final and most desperate hour. sorry for weird non-linear second-person character study disguised as ship (im not) and also sorry that i waited until this was 100% unjossable before i did anything with it (im definitely not). title is from vienna teng's 'landsailor,' though it also owes a huge debt to most of the decemberists catalog, the hamilton soundtrack, misato katsuragi and ritsuko akagi, and mia fey and lana skye. 
> 
> also, obviously to [HorribleThing](http://archiveofourown.org/users/horriblething), [thebookishdark](http://archiveofourown.org/users/thebookishdark), and whatever elliott's ao3 tag is now, my absolute rocks in this fandom and the reason i've made it this far. sorry that what you ended up with is.............. this.

On your first foray into the world you're going to finally save - the first step of your new and newly singular life - you knock on the office door of the one person who could ever stop you. 

"Professor Miller?" you say, and the woman in front of you, gray-shot dark hair piled on her head in a bun that still barely reaches your eye level, cocks her head keen. 

"I'm only 'Professor' for my students, and unless I misplaced someone again I'm pretty sure I only have three of those," she says, a little wary but not withdrawn. "'Maureen' should do fine, I think."

"Maureen," you echo, circling around the realization that you can't remember the last time you introduced yourself to someone who wouldn't be gone when the seasons turned. She's staring. You offer your hand, and say, "I'm a biographer." Hasn't been true in a hundred years; truer now than ever. What has the word ever meant, if not the sole keeper of lives otherwise lost. 

She eyes your hand and then back up. "Is there... something I should call you?" she says, a half-step sharp of teasing. 

You cycle through your oddly-cobbled aliases; you'd planned on keeping this to yourself in memoriam more than necessity. Your first atonement, to keep from yourself the one thing you gave to him, to any of them. "I can't - " you begin, and in doing it find yourself unable to lie. "...It's Lucretia," you say. 

You settle on this strange doomed earth at last. 

Something in the name, or you giving it, pulls Maureen Miller outwards, and she considers you with a focus that makes you feel insect-pinned. "...Would you like to come in?" she says, after some long, silent internal discussion, and pulls the door open the rest of the way. 

"Very much so," you reply. 

She pours you a cup of overstrong coffee. You explain to her that based on her groundbreaking research, her intriguing family history, you believe she would be an ideal subject to write on. Flattery suits her, crossing an ankle over her knee as she leans back in the armchair across from you. 

"I'm not dead yet," she says, that same ghost of a joke pulling at her mouth, and your heart goes stone before you realize what she means. 

"There's still a lot I'd like to talk about," you say, reaching for the cup. "Even when you still have so many stories left to tell."

That gets a real smile, almost. Interviews on long-dead worlds have kept you sharp enough to remember how this goes, where to place your questions, how to take her answers, the way you form the picture no one else has seen - this isn't truly why you're here but you can't quite stop yourself. 

Maureen Miller has a child. Maureen Miller is going to save the world. 

The one follows the other, though you're not sure in what order; it's the first you seem to hit against the hardest. "Do you have any children?" she asks you, offhand, and you nearly choke on it, imagining - past the physical and logical impossibility, past the cruelty of bringing a child to the life you had before or to the new world you've already burned - you, glass-smooth and lying, you who only keeps what she does not destroy, allowed to raise something vulnerable. 

"No," you answer, and she nods. 

"He's at a difficult age," she says. "Though to that end I suppose I am too."

"Is he planning on carrying on your research?" you ask.

"Somebody's going to have to," she answers. "If we don't look out for this world, then I don't know who will."

The world, and what you know, and what you've done to it: like lightning down your spine. You were struck by lightning, once, and now, like the blight you brought upon Maureen's world, no one knows it but you, no body carries it but yours, and even then - 

"And you think your work is - " You fumble. " - is the key to that?"

Maureen's focus tightens. "Look, every day there are things happening that we can't explain, events and patterns with no way to rationalize them - somewhere out there are powers that are clearly beyond our comprehension. And I believe we ought to be looking to worlds beyond our own if we want to have the slightest chance of understanding them."

The static of the things you've seen sits heavy on your tongue: you could speak barely a word and leave Maureen with a lifetime's worth of research. You, the sole guiding light to her worlds beyond and you not alone; you, the desperate shadow that has already consumed all she wanted and could take so much more from her still. The first of a thousand times you will make this choice, and your hands begin trembling in your lap. You shouldn't have come. 

"...I should go." You push the coffee cup gently across the table. "This has been - so enlightening, but I don't want to keep you from your work too long."

She stands as you do, and offers her hand. "I really enjoyed talking with you," she says, and it sounds sincere. "Should I expect you back again?"

Mild and with an expectation you can't remember how to navigate. You cannot bring her into this, which means you cannot bring your life to her - your life, your vow, your wood and stone resolve to do this for everyone, the way you did before. You have other, more important things to deal with on your own. You have two bodies yet to find. But - if she could help - 

"...Next week?" you suggest, and Maureen Miller smiles. 

 

* * *

 

"Lucas," you say, from a desk like a bulwark, when it's come down to just the two of you. "You understand that I would... appreciate it if from now on you would refrain from calling me by name in front of Bureau employees."

He stares flatly past you. "Of course," he says. "Madam Director."

Another strand of light frays to a thread. 

 

* * *

 

You meet her son the second time. He arrives unannounced halfway through your conversation, not looking at you as he pulls open the door - "Oh, Lucas," Maureen says, and you almost move to respond before the name registers in its entirety. "This is the woman I was telling you about - the biographer."

Your title; your sphere of control. "Ah," Lucas says. "...Hello." He looks so much like her, but fidgeting and sullen, too aware of his own form. He turns back to Maureen, handing her a notebook. "You left this behind," he says. "I thought you said you wanted to go over the results."

"What would I do without you, love," she says, a little distantly, already paging through it as she takes it from his hand.

"I'll see you at home," he says in response, but he looks lighter for it. He nods to you as he leaves.

You're not here to ask about him - you already know more than you should allow yourself. You set your own notes aside to watch Maureen engrossed, and then she turns past a diagram, a ring of twelve colored circles, and you nearly tear the book out of her hands. 

"What's that?" you say, all level, as if seeing it doesn't make you feel like a stranger to her, and who you are, and who you used to be. 

Maureen rests a hand against it. "This," she says, with a quiet ardor, and then looks up at you. "You asked about the work, Lucretia, this - this is the work. This is  _our_  work."

"It's beautiful," you say, because it is - beautiful and awful and raw. "Am I allowed to ask you about it, or would you have to kill me if you told me anything?"

She laughs once, the tinkling sound of something clear. "Just so long as you don't publish anything before I do." She leans in close so that the page sits between the two of you, she and the book both smelling like coffee and smoke. "So you and I and everything we know exist here, in the prime material plane." She points; you don't have to look. You could be back at your first day of the academy. "And you're probably familiar with a lot of the others, just from how frequently they turn up in spellcasting - elemental, ethereal, celestial - and then some we don't understand as well, like thought."

"And you're - " You trace one finger around the ring, like a ritual. " - trying to tap into these other planes?"

"Not just to tap into them." You tear your eyes away from the page to meet hers. "We talk about the planes as though they're just power sources, but these are entire worlds that exist outside of our own. And we know that energy, messages, even spirits can travel between them, so imagine how much we could learn if we could expand our capacities beyond that. There could be planes we don't even know of yet - there could be something even bigger than the world as we understand it."

Unimaginably bigger, and unimaginably more deadly. "Is this what your students are learning about?"

"Some of it," says Maureen. "Not all. But you're not a student, are you?"

"I suppose I'm not, at that," you answer, and she turns the page, and she shows you more.  

 

* * *

 

There's something she tells you near the end - nearly oracular, if that could mean anything to you anymore - as the two of you are standing in her father's museum. "He had this saying," she says. "I'm sure you've heard it before, but. He used to tell everyone that you die twice: once when your body dies and again when somebody says your name for the last time."

She's right - you almost certainly heard it, in one of your brighter lifetimes, but even if you hadn't you would still be living in the fear of it, every day. That night, as you're falling asleep, you repeat their names to yourself: the one known by this and nothing else, the three who who cannot carry the weight to themselves that they do to you, and ending, always, on the two you could yet be the last one to say. The way they said it to each other; the way her brother said it after she was gone; the way you have said it to yourself, nearly every night for twelve years. Barry and Barold and Lulu, Lupa, Lup.

"He certainly seemed to take that to heart," you say to Maureen, staring at a plaque with her father's name on it. "...Does that ever scare you?"

You're not sure if you mean the death or the remembering, but Maureen looks at you and smiles. "Think I'm going to stick around for a while yet," she says. It sounds almost like a regret. 

 

* * *

 

You give her a necklace. It runs against everything you should be doing, and you can't imagine yourself naive enough not to know that, but somewhere there's a version of you, ungripped by your own sins, that wants only this. A world where it could be just this. The artificing you remember easily enough - it hasn't been that long; the protection spell comes less readily, trickling from your hands like a cloth hung to dry. You need to remember how to do this. You're going to need it when the time comes. 

You can do something, anything with yourself besides take. You can keep her far enough that you can't hurt her. 

The finished necklace, a clear pink crystal on a smooth black cord, reminds you of her. Faceted and uncompromising. Too clear and alive for you. Too much, too much, too much. Davenport watches, an albatross, as you complete it, and you know to have it gone from you. 

When you bring it to her, there's a note pinned to the door of her office: 'Lucretia, meet me at my lab," followed by an address. 

It's not far from the campus, but distinct from it, a squared-off metal and concrete edifice, looking like additions on top of additions. The door makes a series of clicks and swings open as you approach. 

"Maureen?" you call into an unvarnished entryway, branching hallways, and hear, "Over here!" from somewhere up ahead. 

The door, ajar, reads ABSOLUTELY NO ENTRY, but Maureen's voice calls from inside that it's fine, and you push it the rest of the way open to find a much smaller room than you were expecting, just her at a paper-stacked desk and a locked case across from it. She smiles when she sees you come in. 

"I'm glad you made it here," she says, unexpectedly warm; her mind so far ahead of her body, like it was when you looked at the planes together. "I wanted to show you something."

You rub your thumb against the cord of the necklace in your satchel, and shut the door behind you. 

She's already standing up and crossing the room to the case, laying her hand flat against the lid and opening it to pull out a compact the size of her palm. "This belonged to my grandfather," she says as she brings it over to you. "It's - well, you should probably see it for yourself."

"I didn't take you for quite such a sentimentalist," you start to say, and it crumbles like embers in your throat as she places the compact in your hand, raises the lid onto a sight the like of which you thought was barred from you now. A world you've never seen, bright-lit and fast-moving and unknowable, cities you've witnessed the like of but never the equal, Maureen electric with anticipation beside you but absent the six people who need to experience this, the only six people who should. 

"Maureen," you say, voice coming back to you at a crawl. "How did you - what is this?"

"This," Maureen says, "is the most important scientific discovery of the past century. This is the plane of thought." You stare to her; she looks triumphant. "My grandfather found this - this formation of emerald, a perfect circle, the only one we've ever found, and we had  _proof_ , for the first time, that we could see into them, from here. And it's only specific crystals, naturally occurring, and it has to be a circle, but - the amount of scientific progress we've made from this alone, from being able to observe the results of pure logical thought... if you even consider what we could do if we could see into any of the other planes the same way - "

"Does anyone else know about this?" you ask, one last desperate lunge for control; you don't know what you would do if she said yes. 

"...Just Lucas and I," she says, shaken just for a moment. "Lucas doesn't... get out much, so I doubt he shared it with anybody, which - just leaves you."

"Why me?" you say, and that's the only question, isn't it; you've been crying it into the dark for a year and here, in front of Maureen Miller, it comes out just this edge of trembling. 

That crystalline laugh again. "That's a good question, actually." She closes your hand over the emerald mirror, turns to face you as you work on remembering when you are. "It's been a long time since I talked to someone this much, you know? It's very - " And the stare that you still haven't learned how to compose yourself under. " - I feel as though you've asked me more off the record than on it, at this point."

In the silvery haze of the world you wish this could be, you would have told her. To share your trench of history with anyone; to not keep her inquisitive firefly-light in the dark. If there was any way you could, and not doom you both, and not put an end to saving her and everyone else here - you've done too much already. Her hand has not left yours. Like a coward, deflecting, you say, "I have something for you," and pull the necklace out of your pocket. 

She still has one hand on another universe as she takes it from you, and she's staring as though this is the impossible thing. "Pink tourmaline," she says, in quiet wonder. "How - "

And then she's craning upwards and kissing you, two crystals between the two of you, her lips warm against your own, and you can't recall the last time you touched someone since cradling Magnus's body in your arms, and before that you had long acknowledged what the lot of you would never have but with each other; you feel as though you must be terribly cold. 

She reaches back with her hand holding the necklace and places it against the back of your neck, pulling you closer, a tether to this world and not your imagined one. Maureen Miller has a child; Maureen Miller has a plan, and so do you, and those two things will destroy each other, one way or another. You pull away, and tell her, "I should go."

"Lucretia," she says, for the first time uncertain: your name, the name that brought you here, the name you never should have given anyone but yourself. Another botched exit, like a ragged wound. 

"I'm sorry," you say, meaning it. You leave. You don't come back. 

 

* * *

 

Lucas thinks so much like her, but without her surety, her clarity of vision, you find your connection with him slipping. 

"I want you to be a part of this organization," you tell him, what feels like endlessly. "But you understand I have a hard time doing that if you can't be completely honest with me."

"I'm here as a consultant," he responds. "My research outside the work I do for you isn't relevant to the Bureau."

It was, once. It is, if his mother would have wanted you to stop him. You say, "If it affects the quality of that work - "

"It won't," he says. "Doesn't." And he glances at you sideways, a sharply searching look that reminds you so much of - "I'm not the one who started keeping secrets here."

"Lucas." Your hand tighter on the staff, nearly a tell. "I would suggest you watch your tone."

He comes so close to laughing, as he nods to you and turns to leave. "You almost sound like you could be my mother," he says. 

 

* * *

 

Absent a frame of reference, the search blurs together; it's nothing, it's nothing, it's nothing, until it isn't. It's nothing until it's you in a neon deathtrap, the two of them - twins, like a gruesome joke, twins grinning and gold-clad and identically striking - and the knife-edge of their voice as the wheel lands on the mind and you tell them, without a breath, no. How interesting, in an echoed purr, that denying someone their memories would be an uncrossable line for you, Lucretia. I wonder if anyone else would have anything to say about that. 

You don't give them your memories. You can give them anything else, and nearly do; one word and you age more than any of you ever did, one word and a toll that has never been taken on you, and you realize you're not getting out of here. 

You cannot die. You cannot die. You die and it's worse than them asking for your memories, you die and it's over; you die and the world is torn apart and none of them can ever, ever come back. 

They tell you one of you can leave if you abandon the other, and Cam swears you won't give that to them. And you look at him, and you think of five people out there somewhere in the world, and the world that contains them, and the century-aged pragmatism that leaves this not a choice at all; and you, thief of thieves, cruelty of cruelties, slam the door on him and run. 

You cannot die. You cannot die. You will become, have become a thing of brutality, a void that does nothing by your own hand but devours all the same; but you will live, and so will everything, and on that day perhaps the earth will swallow you. You drag yourself through the wilds without flinching - it's no harder than your desperate year, the only one of you still flesh, and easier, maybe, for not expecting anything more. You've killed lawyers; you can kill a chimera, even in a body unrecognizable to you for the first time. You cannot die, not here, not yet. 

But you might have, without Cam there, for you to offer up unwillingly - no one, for you, has ever done anything willingly. You understand: if you keep trying to do this alone, it will be the end of you. You bring ruin on everyone you touch, but something worse will bring ruin on all of you yet, if you don't. 

And: without even going home you find yourself at Maureen Miller's door. 

The lab looks nearly the same, in the years - years? - it's been; you only visited the once but you've seen it a dozen times since, sketches you keep for yourself because who else would have them. They've made new additions, you're sure, but the structure is still patchwork and imposing, and not where you belong. You lift your hand to knock, and halt, and before you can make the right decision the door swings open, and there she is. You haven't watched someone change in all you can remember, but the years have settled on her softly, still bright and sharp and steady. 

"Lucretia," she says, like she's been waiting, her voice catching on it as she takes in the harrowed wreck of you. Maureen is here, in her monument to progress, and you left your family alone and abandoned a man to hell, and for all your work you are no closer to stopping the slow march of destruction, and something in the heart of you finally shatters. 

"I - " you start, and with no way to finish it that she could deserve nearly fall to your knees in her doorway. She takes your hand, and says something soft you can't place, and leads you inside. 

You end up in a wooden chair, holding what might well be the same mug of cheaply made coffee you drank from years ago, as Maureen, distantly, apologizes for not offering more. 

"Lucretia," she says again, sitting across from you, as you breathe in the steam and remember what it is to exist. "What happened?"

Another time, another life; if you could tell her you never would have left. You say, "It's possible I may have gotten in over my head."

"Biography's a demanding gig, huh," she says, just this side of knowing, and she reaches out and dabs blood off your cheek with her sleeve. You're halfway through remembering how lovely she is when you realize: she's still wearing the necklace. 

"Maureen," you say to her, and her hand stills on your face, and you lean in and kiss her. 

If the sensation of it jolts her as badly as it does you then she doesn't let on, half-standing, taking your face with both hands, not letting go; it never crossed your mind that she could have thought of you while you were gone but now, selfishly, you wonder. 

"Come with me," she says, pulling away for just a breath, and dizzy you let her take your hand and lead you down the hall, to a small unvarnished door and into a cramped sleeping quarters, and the door closes behind both of you like an omen. This is how you come to understand your new body: slowly, deliberately, at the hands of the closest thing to a lover you've had. 

"Lulu," she murmurs against your neck, as she wraps her arms around you, and you feel your nails dig into her skin on an instinct. 

"Not that," you say, and she stills at it. "Not that. Never that."

"...Okay," she says, kissing you again, as you tremble with the murder that would have been. "It's okay."

You wake up both of you against each other in her too-small bed; you can't remember falling asleep. Maybe this is the line where you have to stop pretending you can back out of the damage of your choices. Maybe you crossed that line a long time ago. 

You lay your hand on her arm, and say, "I need your help with something."

She says, "What can I do?"

 

* * *

 

Merle is watching over your shoulder while you annotate his memoir, when he asks you, "You ever think about family?"

Traveling with any of them means you have to get used to non-sequiturs. "You mean - " you start, and give a vague nod towards where Magnus is shouting to Barry outside. 

"Not these wingnuts, Pan love 'em." Merle sits down on the chair backwards, which you're sure he thinks makes him look grounded and wise. "I mean like - before all this happened, did you ever think about settling down? Having kids?"

"Is this a proposition, Mr. Highchurch," you respond, deliberately neutral. 

"Nah," he says, unalarmed by it. "I could never - the true love thing is fine and all, but it's never really been my game, and how weird would it be if things went south and then we were just... stuck with each other for a thousand years? No thanks."

You've set the pen down by now, your focus squarely on him. "That would limit your options, then, wouldn't it?"

"Yeah, I know," he says. "I'm not talking any for-real plans here, just... if we ever figure this whole thing out, I think I might like to have kids."

You, struggling to imagine what a half-Merle child would even look like. "I never really assumed you to be the fatherly type."

"Me neither, but it looks like we've got some time, huh?" he says, shrugging, and then glances back outside. "I'm starting to get it, I guess. Having someone to remember you when you're gone."

"I don't think that's going to be a problem," you say, tapping the pen against the manuscript, and he laughs. 

"No," he says. "No, I guess not."

 

* * *

 

You tell her there's something you've been keeping from her, which is as great an understatement as you've ever made. 

"I want to show you this," you say. "I need to show you this for you to be part of what I'm working on. But it's going to be a lot to process, and once you understand it there's no turning back."

To her: only a challenge. "The only thing," she tells you. "If I'm going to be involved with this then I need Lucas to be too. I can't keep something like this from him, and we - he's a smart kid. You'll want him on your side."

Every inch you expand this circle leaves more room for someone to get hurt; but she's right that this is your only option. All of your options have been only options. The next day both of them meet you at your cramped unsettled house, the only people who ever have, and you lead them downstairs to the basement, and the silent, smoky tank in the corner. You don't look at what's inside; you never do, for fear its judgement will paralyze you. Your only two companions, both of them in prisons you made, neither speaking a language you can understand. 

"Here," you say, portioning a vial for each of them out of the tank. "Drink this." Both of them look identically wary. "I know how cagey I'm being, and please believe me that if there was any way I could be clearer I would - but I promise, I promise, if you drink this you'll understand."

Maureen makes eye contact with you for five unflinching seconds and then downs the whole thing; trust like a knife to your throat. Lucas drinks his as soon as it touches her lips. Things happen with an immediacy after that. 

"Breathe," you say quickly, as both of them stagger a little and reach to the wall for support. You hadn't considered what this process would be like in the reverse; you'd never thought it would be something allowed to you. 

"Th-this whole time - " says Maureen, as she rights herself, and you can watch her thinking back to the first day, in her office, everything newly ruined, every unblinking lie you told. 

"I know," you say to her, Lucas's silent calculating gaze on the both of you. "I know, I wish I could have told you from the start but I understand if you can't be part of this, I'm not - "

"So these artifacts," Lucas speaks up. "These are what you've been looking for?"

"...Yes," you say. Honesty feels ill-fitting on you. 

Maureen, still barely steady, moves towards the tank and rests a hand against the glass, unburdened by fear; and then she looks to you the same way you watched her look at the green mirror, and she says, "Tell me everything."

In the end, you never do.

 

* * *

 

Lucas admits to you himself what he's done but you're the one who has to make a decision, because that much is the life you've chosen. You're the one who lifts your head and squares your shoulders and calls down the judgement on who gets turned to stone, or worse, for crimes they have yet to commit. 

Lucas makes a choice and so do you, in the space you yet control, everyone you've warned against exactly this waiting on your single word. Lucas is the last Miller; Lucas is Maureen's son; Lucas's life is the last, impossible promise you made to her, after every other one you broke. She asked you, once, if you had children, and maybe if you had you would understand, but instead what you have is this. You have misled soldiers, and vanished family, and a dozen other people of this earth that you invited into this, the same way Lucas was, but now Lucas has the Stone, and the choice is already made. Taako is impassive at its mention, because that's what you made him be; there is an actual child behind you, and his world below. This cannot be allowed to continue. 

You tell the Regulators to do what they need to do, and slam another door. If there is forgiveness left for you, you nearly hope it won't be given for this. 

 

* * *

 

Twelve years is an eternity; twelve years is no time at all. Twelve years is searching and missing and aging and losing and then you and Maureen, every day, working to build something greater. Maureen has connections; Maureen has ideas; Maureen believes that together, finally, will come what neither of you has yet accomplished alone. 

"You're going to need a lot of people," she tells you, on one of the breathless late nights you spend on impossible, undreamable planning. She stares into the distance, alert, and says, "You're going to need a base."

She's not wrong; the thought of it still makes you feel unsteady. "There's a few safe houses I've used over the past couple of years, we could set up in one of those - "

Maureen is suddenly lightened. She says, "I had something bigger in mind."

And suddenly this is your life: she makes the moon for you. The moon, and her partway between the earth and you; the moon, and the two of you standing on it, her arms around your waist, all that you could do laid bare. 

She and Lucas build more, domes, cannons, fishtanks, and you find people, and every step is more thrown to the gulf of forgetting, and every expansion of the circle is someone else who is going to get hurt in the end, but staring over the edge at the earth it feels almost like it did when you first arrived, and like this - this time around you can do it. You throw lives into the path of every summer snowstorm, every village turned gold, and they are fallen and erased from the earth but you are alive and next time, next time. Maureen kisses you beneath the portrait she commissions and pleads with you to let her try and find one of them, and you watch what happens and tell her you need her here. You don't say you're afraid of losing her. You were sure you would never have cause to say that to anyone again. 

More failures. More soldiers. More history only you carry. Guards just to keep the place together, someone to maintain the transport system; your supply of history from vanished worlds slows to a stop, and you seek out this boy who nearly could give you the whole conservatory in one note, and you set him to work, and you don't go to the tank again. Music gone; lives gone; cities still burning but you alive. Maureen says you just have to keep trying. A lilting, self-aggrandizing drow, an orc who introduces herself by asking who she can fight, everyone you know still just a reflection of somebody else. 

"What if it's all for nothing?" you say to Maureen, in your bed, feeling the words burn in your throat as you do. "What if it's been impossible all along?"

"Nothing's impossible, love," she tells you, and you do not deserve it. "But change never happens without struggle. You're doing something bigger than even I ever dreamed of; it's going to take time." She kisses you on the forehead, and then draws back, and says, "Let Lucas and I go out and help reclaim them. We've been here the whole time; we know what to look out for by now."

You take both her hands. "No," you tell her. "Maureen, I need teams of people just to prevent reclaimers from causing more damage - you're too important to send you out into that." She looks off and you say, gentler, "Who's going to solve the mysteries of our planar system if you're gone?"

"No one, if we let the world tear itself apart," she says, soft but unrelenting. "I could do it if we just - "

"What if no one can do it?" you say, and she holds back at the fear in it. "What if they were just unstoppable from the start, what if the earth is doomed, what if I - what if we - "

"Lucretia," she says, and you so rarely hear it from anyone but her that it shoots straight through you. "This isn't what got us into this. This isn't why all these people started following you. If we need to try something new, than we try something new, but you're the only one who can do this. You're not giving up on me."

The fate you've chosen for yourself: you, the only one you could do this. You lean yourself against Maureen's shoulder. "I'm going to die here," you say, and you've known it since you claimed this world as your own, more since twenty long years made their uninvited home in your bones, but only confronted with your endless task do you truly understand what it means. A hundred years impossible, twelve years desperate, and despite all of it it's going to end here for you, one way or another. 

Maureen strokes her hand against your hair. "No one's dying until the work is done," she tells you. "And anyways: there are worse places for it."

She's gone the next morning, down to the lab; she's staying there more and more now, or maybe you have too much to notice. Either way: that same week you have an egg, and you have an answer, and on the next return mission the three of them stand in front of you, older, wounded, blank and distant. 

There's a lot to account for in twelve years. Maybe she's right: if you die here, when this is over, that might be okay. 

 

* * *

 

A lab explodes; a mirror shatters; you, with a ship no one has touched, prepare to do the thing you always swore to do. You wonder, in some half-remembered prayer, if she would be proud of you. You'd like to imagine she would.

 

* * *

 

The last time you see her, it's because of Lucas. It's Lucas who gets ahold of you on the stone, Lucas who says, with unusual reservation, "Would you be able to come by the lab later today?"

If Maureen wanted to talk to you, she would have asked you herself; if Lucas was working on something, you would be far from the first person he would show it to. This is something you have no metric for, from the two people who have always shown you where you stand, and the thought leaves you floating a moment before you say, "Of course. I'll see you then."

Lucas, too, who greets you when Avi sends you down to the lab, stiff and hesitant in the atrium, fumbling for words. 

"Lucas," you say, recalling this sort of personal dread. "Is there something wrong."

"It's just - " he says, and looks down the hall, where Maureen turns the corner and goes alight as she sees you. 

"Lucretia!" she calls out, nearly running, reaching you and flinging her arms around you with that clear tinkling laugh. "It's been too long, hasn't it? I hoped you would hold off a few more days, but - "

You can't be anything but alive seeing her, though as that crests you find it doesn't do much to calm the insensibility of fear. You glance back towards Lucas, though whatever he had to say seems swallowed now, and pulling away enough to look at Maureen you say, "A few more days for what?"

"I'm working on something," she says, and the thrill of it doesn't fade from her. "...Something remarkable."

This, at least, you've seen before. "Hm," you say. "And were you going to let me know what this something was, or - "

She tilts her head, kisses you just in front of your ear. "You've kept enough secrets from me in your life," she says. "I think I'm allowed this one for a few days yet."

"Mother," says Lucas, stepping forward, and whether it's warning or pleading you find you can't tell, and Maureen does not react. She pushes away from you, still breathless with it, and watching her in absolute exhilaration you wonder, not for the first time, how much more either of them could have done if you hadn't yet wrested them into fixing your mistakes. What light she could have brought into the world if you had never knocked on her office door; remembered, instead of undone. If you ever could have stopped it; if the world can still bud through all this brushfire. What kind of place you'll be leaving, for any of them. In front of you, Maureen throws her arms out and spins once, as though she can't contain it, and the necklace lifts up, just for a moment, and spins with her. 

Tourmaline suspended in the air about to fall. She says: "We're going to make this world so beautiful."


End file.
